Jury orders Samsung to pay $290M to Apple in patent case

A jury has ordered Samsung to pay US$290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets.

The award is much closer to Apple's demand than to what Samsung proposed

By
Martyn Williams
| 21 Nov 2013

A jury has ordered Samsung to pay US$290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets.

The verdict, reached on the third day of deliberation by the eight-person jury, is less than the $380 million Apple was demanding for the infringement, but it's much more than the $52 million that Samsung had been arguing it should pay.

The verdict represents a second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets. But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an "impermissible legal theory" to its calculations. Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial.

Over the course of the five-day trial, Apple argued that it would have sold hundreds of thousands more iPhones had it not been for Samsung's infringement, and therefore it's owed hundreds of millions of dollars it alleged Samsung made in profit from sales of infringing devices.

Samsung presented market research surveys conducted by Apple and third parties that showed a myriad of reasons why people bought its phones, including the large screens, longer battery life and close integration with Google. It argued that the presence of the patented Apple technology wouldn't have changed these purchase decisions and so Apple lost no sales.

With regard to profits, Samsung said that Apple's calculations were erroneous and it didn't make nearly as much money selling the phones as Apple suggested.

The jury didn't buy Samsung's arguments.

The case has been shadowing a fierce battle between Apple and Samsung in the smartphone marketplace. At the end of the third quarter, Samsung enjoyed a 32 percent share of the global market compared to Apple's 12 percent, according to figures from Gartner.